UPCOMING: "Midnight Brew" Short Film
Campaign link| September, 2025
WHAT: Midnight Brew is my junior thesis film at Loyola Marymount University.
THE STORY: Zara Aguilar is an underpaid, overworked waitress balancing exhaustion, motherhood, and the emotional toll of her wife being deployed overseas. All she wants is to finish her shift and get home to her young daughter. But there’s one problem— she just can’t get the last customer to leave.
Trapped in Dawson’s Diner, a neon-lit limbo where the clock ticks louder and the fluorescent lights hum endlessly, Zara’s night should be over. But it isn’t. As the lights buzz louder and her frustration grows, Zara’s desperate attempts to force the customer out spiral into a twisted, comic battle against a system that won’t let her go.
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT: This film is for anyone who’s ever worked a shift that feels like it will never end. Anyone who’s ever had to grin through exhaustion, bite their tongue when they deserved better, or felt torn between work and the people they love. Anyone who’s fought the urge to snap back, defend themselves, or stand up to those that look down on you.
With sharp humor and grounded emotion, Night Shift dives into the complexities of obligation—how we stay in jobs that drain us because we need to, how we carry the weight of responsibility, and how those moments of exhaustion can shape our identities. I want to shine a light on the emotional labor that so many workers are expected to hide with a smile.
"Palm Springs" Scene Recreation
Watch here| April, 2025
Done as a final for my sophomore Screen Directing class, I recreated a scene from the movie Palm Springs. The purpose of this exercise was to explore character motivation and psyche with real actors, allowing us to practice the directing techniques we learned in a controlled scene with established characters.
